


Catch Me When I Fall

by AuroraNova



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 05:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5117801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraNova/pseuds/AuroraNova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU for “Fallen.” I’ve read a lot of stories where his relationship with Jack is the last thing Daniel remembers, so I decided to try a different approach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catch Me When I Fall

**Author's Note:**

> LeiLadleLei inquired about more of my SG1 fic, so I've brought another one over from LiveJournal. Ask and ye shall receive. =) Originally published on LJ in 2010. 
> 
> Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit made, etc., etc.

As soon as Lieutenant Johnston had Earth dialed, Warren was on his radio. “SG-2 to Stargate Command.”

“Is everything alright, Colonel?” asked General Hammond.

“Yes sir. Good news and bad news, but more good than bad. We’ve found Dr. Jackson, General. The bad news is he doesn’t _remember_ that he’s Dr. Jackson. Or much of anything, actually.” It struck Warren as something like one of the soap operas his ex had wasted so much time watching.

“Is he willing to come back with you?”

“Yes sir.” Warren still didn’t know how that worked. Dr. Jackson had been suspicious until he noticed his dog tags. Why dog tags meant he was trustworthy, Warren had no idea, but he took his lucky breaks where he could get them. “He’s saying goodbye to the villagers now.”

“Very good. I’ll have SG-1 come meet him.” The general sounded pleased, despite the amnesia issue.

“He doesn’t remember them, General.”

“I know. But they remember him.”

“We’ll be back in a few minutes, sir.”

“Looking forward to it, Colonel. SGC out.”

He just knew O’Neill was going to be mad that SG-1 hadn’t gotten this assignment.

* * *

This was crazy. He was supposed to walk through a wall of water and suddenly be in another place. It defied common sense. Agreeing to this scheme was madness. And yet, the man called Warren had the adornment, the one that he’d seen in his dreams.

Therefore, against all reason, he was about to walk through the wall of water.

“I know it sounds absurd, but you did this a couple of times a week almost every week for five years,” said Warren.

He swallowed hard and nodded. “What does it feel like?”

“It’s a little cold.”

Tentatively, he poked the wall of water. It was cool around his finger. “So we just walk through?”

“That’s it. But first, they sent through these.” Warren handed him a set of circles.

“What is that?”

“Glasses. You wear them.” The other man set them on his face, and suddenly the world became much clearer. “SG-1 though it would help you.”

“I really am your Dr. Jackson,” he said, amazed that other people could know him so well when he didn’t know himself.

Warren grinned. “Yep. Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Okay, then,” said Warren. “Let’s go.”

They stepped through together. It was cold and his ears were filled with a strange screeching sound. Shades of blue and black swirled around him but he couldn’t see Warren.

Then his foot hit something solid and metal. He looked around. Warren was beside him again. “Let’s make room for the rest of my team. Besides, there are people anxious to see you.”

The room was gray, from the walls to the ramp they were walking down. He sincerely hoped that there was more color to be found eventually, or this Earth that Warren talked of was going to be a dull place.

“Dr. Jackson, it’s good to see you again,” said an older, bald man.

“That’s General Hammond,” Warren told him. “And this is SG-1.”

According to Warren, he had been part of a team called SG-1. He studied them carefully. There was a tall, imposing dark man with a gold symbol on his forehead, a young man, a smiling woman with blonde hair, and a silver-haired man.

“There’s something familiar,” he said.

“Daniel!” exclaimed the blonde woman. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Indeed it is,” said the man with the gold symbol, “even if you do not remember us.”

He looked at the silver-haired man and realized something. That man was wearing the same adornment as Warren. And even with a shirt on, he would recognize that chest with that adornment. He ought to, since it was the one he’d been dreaming about. To his immense frustration, he’d never seen the face in his dreams, but he just knew.

Suddenly the name came to him. “You’re Jack.”

The silver-haired man, Jack, looked at him with hope. “You remember?”

“I remember this.” He closed the gap between them and kissed Jack. And he still didn’t remember much, but the way their lips met was comfortingly familiar. After a minute, Jack stopped hesitating and kissed him back.

Oh, yes. He was home now.

Once they stopped kissing, which was entirely too soon, he realized that everyone was staring at them. The dark man and blonde woman were smiling, but everyone else looked shocked. “What?” he asked. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” said Jack. “Just against regulations.” He turned towards the bald man, Hammond. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you can pretend I gave you my retirement papers ten minutes ago?”

“I think that can be arranged.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“A little thing called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Jack shrugged. “Let’s get you to the infirmary.”

He was content to follow Jack, because Jack was trustworthy.

* * *

The last time he’d been in her infirmary, Daniel had been dying of radiation before ascending. Janet decided it might be for the best that he had amnesia at the moment. He’d been quiet while she started the exam, and she thought it better not to push him. Colonel O’Neill was telegraphing his concern and relief to anyone with eyes, ignoring her warning looks.

“I don’t understand. Why are you retiring?” Daniel asked the colonel.

“You’re retiring, Colonel?” Damn. She lost track of how many heartbeats she’d counted. Well, she might as well learn what was going on before trying again.

“Yes,” he said. “Daniel, it’s no big deal.”

“But why?”

“I can’t stay, now that they know about us.”

“I still don’t understand.”

Sam said gently, “The military doesn’t allow open homosexuality, Daniel.”

“It’s my fault.” Daniel was crestfallen. He apparently didn’t need his memory to automatically fall into guilt. “I kissed you right in front of everyone.”

Janet wished she’d been there to see that. She knew about the two of them because she was their doctor and it was pretty obvious. Once the two of them got together she’d had to personally see to their physicals, just in case. She, Sam, and Teal’c had been the only people who knew, and now in about twenty minutes the entire base was going to know.

“It’s fine, Daniel.”

“No, it’s not. I just… know. Some kind of secrecy.” He gave a frustrated huff. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” The colonel spoke with an intensity Janet had rarely heard. “God, Daniel, you’re back and you remember me, us. Don’t ever be sorry for that.”

“But-”

“Daniel,” Colonel O’Neill interrupted, grabbing his lover’s hand, “please. I thought I’d lost you.”

The raw emotion in his voice – which Janet had never, ever heard – calmed Daniel down. After a minute of just staring at the colonel, Daniel worked a different angle. “But you,” he indicated the rest of them with his hand, “you don’t seem to care.”

“That’s because we’re your friends,” said Janet.

Teal’c chose that moment to share his take. “We have also regretted your absence.”

“I don’t remember.” Daniel was clearly frustrated. “All I remember is Jack, and even then it’s more a sense of familiarity.”

“You remembered his name,” added Sam.

“Which is a very promising sign,” Janet informed him. “I’ll need to do some tests, but that you remembered the colonel’s name suggests that your amnesia isn’t permanent.”

He’d barely stepped foot on Earth before recalling that Colonel O’Neill was familiar and they were lovers, the colonel’s name, and the secrecy that had surrounded their relationship. Janet was getting more hopeful for his recovery by the minute.

“But what if I don’t?”

Sam shrugged a little. “We’ll make friends again.”

“You’re back,” said the colonel. “That’s all I care about.” It was blatantly obvious that he meant it with every fiber of his being. “Hammond’s looking into getting me set up as a civilian consultant, helping with training… but you’re back. That’s enough for me.”

In his own way, Colonel O’Neill could be romance personified, though Janet wasn’t about to risk life and limb by mentioning that out loud.

* * *

“What happened to me?” he asked.

“Always with the hard questions, Daniel,” said Jack. “About a year ago, you had to be a damn hero. Saved millions of people, but got a lethal dose of radiation.”

“I was dying,” he said. It wasn’t familiar, but it was the only logical conclusion. He wondered how he could recognize logical conclusions but not his own name.

“But this Zen alien came. She helped you to another plane of existence.”

“And now I’m back?”

“Apparently.”

This was all a bit much to take in. Traveling through walls of water, aliens, planes of existence… he decided to set that aside for the time being and focus on an easier question. “How long had we been together when that happened?”

“A year and a few months,” said Jack.

The doctor continued to fuss over him, poking and prodding, but his mind was elsewhere. He closed his eyes for a moment and focused on the feel of Jack’s hand. “We’ve done this before. In this room, I’ve been here, and you would hold my hand.”

“When nobody was looking,” agreed Jack with a nod.

He reached over with the hand Jack wasn’t holding and reached for the… dog tags, that was the term. “Your dog tags,” he said aloud. “All that time I wondered why I was dreaming about jewelry, and I was dreaming about you.”   

The adoring way Jack looked at him, he realized, was also familiar. It was the same way Jack had looked at him after the first time they made love. “Oh!”

“Did you remember something else?” asked the doctor.

“This one’s just for us.”

She smiled gently. “Alright then. Tell me if anything else is familiar, okay?”

“This. The room is familiar.”

“You’ve spent enough time here,” commented Jack.

“And you,” he said to Sam and Teal’c. “You’re familiar. Your faces.” He couldn’t remember anything specific except what was related to Jack, but familiarity had to be a good start.

“We’ll give you the tour, maybe it will jog your memory,” said Jack.

The doctor said, “He can go for a walk after I do an MRI.”

“You’ll stay?” he asked Jack.

“I’ll be right here.”

“I do not believe undomesticated equines could move him,” observed Teal’c.

He didn’t know what horses, tamed or otherwise, had to do with anything, but so long as Jack wasn’t going anywhere it didn’t really matter.

* * *

Daniel was back. Jack had steeled himself when Hammond said Daniel didn’t remember anything, expecting the worst. Then Daniel had remembered him and kissed him and Jack didn’t care who saw or that he had to retire. Daniel was back and remembered him. He’d have asked Carter to pinch him if the kiss hadn’t been so unmistakably real. 

Daniel was back, sitting in the infirmary grasping Jack’s hand. Letting Daniel go had been the hardest thing Jack ever did, except maybe accepting that Charlie was gone. Telling Jacob to stop had just about killed him. It _had_ killed part of him, but even that had been preferable to letting Daniel just die, which had been a strong possibility. Daniel had done what he needed to do, then come back, and Jack prayed to a God he wasn’t sure existed (though Thor promised the Judeo-Christian God wasn’t an Asgard and no snake would act like the Jesus that Jack had been taught about in Sunday School) that he’d returned to the mortal plane for good.

“The other man on this SG-1…” Daniel began. “He isn’t a friend?”

“That’s a complicated situation,” said Fraiser. “You saved the lives of countless people on his planet. Jonas has always felt that it should’ve been him. Now, let’s get that MRI started.”

“Can we have a minute?” asked Jack. He desperately needed to be alone with Daniel.

“Of course, Colonel.”

“We’ll be waiting,” promised Carter.

Teal’c added, “We will not allow the medical staff to remove us.” This he said with a meaningful look at Fraiser. The big guy could say a heck of a lot with his looks.

“I missed you,” Jack told Daniel when they were alone, which was an understatement if he’d ever made one.

“So,” Daniel picked at his sleeve nervously, “there isn’t anyone else then?”

“No!”

At his vehemence, Daniel looked up. “Good. That’s good. I’m really sorry about your retirement, Jack. I don’t understand it, but I’m sorry.”

He wrapped Daniel in a tight hug. “Don’t be.” Ideally, he could have SG-1 and Daniel, but that ship had sailed. Jack had lived a year having SG-1 and no Daniel, and if he had to pick one over the other there was no contest. “I’m just glad you’re home, Daniel.”

“I don’t remember home,” said Daniel softly, “except that it’s with you.”

Amnesia was making Daniel more emotional, Jack thought. He wondered what his own excuse was.

“Does that mean you’ll consider moving in with me?” He didn’t want to be too pushy and scare Daniel, but he didn’t want to be apart from him either. And Daniel no longer had an apartment anyway.

“I don’t think I need to consider it,” replied Daniel. “That memory from before, the one I didn’t want to tell. You were looking at me the same way you did, right after the first time we made love.”

Jack kissed him, softly and lovingly. “Love you, Daniel.” The words came much more easily than they usually did. Expressing emotions was not one of his strong suits by any means, but getting Daniel back had brought everything to the surface.

“It’s strange. I don’t know what I like to eat here or what I did, but I do know I love you, Jack O’Neill.”

“You remembered my last name,” he said with a grin.

“So I did. I think – I hope – everything is in there. I don’t know what I’ll do if it isn’t.”

“We’ll figure something out.”

“Okay,” said Daniel.

He may or may not have a job. Technically, there was a chance he might not even have a pension, though he was pretty sure Hammond would get his retirement sorted out. There was no telling how much Daniel would eventually remember or if he would ever be cleared for gate travel again. But Daniel was back, and that was good enough for Jack. Everything else would work itself out.


End file.
